WASHINGTON — When Spirit Airlines went out of business this year, it joined the long list of U.S. airlines that have disappeared in recent decades, including former household names like Continental Airlines, Northwest Airlines and US Airways.
The four biggest airlines now control roughly three-quarters of the U.S. market, and that's prompting big questions about consolidation in the industry.
Critics say the shrinking number of carriers hasn't been good for the flying public. But the airline industry argues there's still plenty of competition where it matters most.
"We have more competition per route than ever before," said Chris Sununu, the former governor of New Hampshire who now heads the industry trade group Airlines for America, at a hearing last month on Capitol Hill. "When I go to buy a ticket, I have four or five or six carriers going from Wichita to Dallas. So now they're all competing on that exact same route."
Wichita, Kan., was a surprising example to pick. While it's true there are six airlines serving Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport, there's only one that flies nonstop to Dallas.
"If you want a direct flight from Wichita to Dallas, it's only American Airlines," said Rachel Mayberry, the airport's air service and marketing manager. "If you're willing to do a layover somewhere, you can get to Dallas through other carriers."
But, she added, most people — including her — would probably drive the 360 miles to Dallas before they would take a connecting flight through Denver, Houston or Chicago.
If there is more competition between the airlines than ever before, it doesn't feel that way in Wichita, she said.
"You probably are seeing it in the large airports," Mayberry said. "But for a smaller airport like us, the majority of our flights are one carrier to one nonstop destination."
In some ways, Wichita is typical. There are fewer major airlines in the U.S. than there used to be, and they funnel a large and growing share of their flights through a handful of megahub airports.
The airlines insist there's still a healthy level of competition when you consider connecting flights through their hubs. But critics say this level of consolidation is unprecedented — and bad for consumers.
"From the airlines' perspective, it makes sense," said Ganesh Sitaraman, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School and the author of the book Why Flying Is Miserable and How to Fix It. "Bigger is better, and it'll be more efficient for them, even if there's a lot of drawbacks for communities and passengers."
For better or worse, the airline industry of today was born in the late 1970s, when Congress deregulated the airlines. Sitaraman said that much of what's wrong with flying can be traced all the way back to deregulation, including the emergence of megahub airports.
"Even the experience of being in a very, very crowded airport waiting can be disorienting and frustrating to people," Sitaraman said. "If you have to connect, you might find yourself running a half-marathon from one side of the airport to the other, just to see the door close before your flight."
Hubs aren't new. The big airlines have been structuring their business this way since at least the 1980s. They can keep costs down by concentrating more of their operations and maintenance in one place, while also offering service to a large network of destinations.
Airlines say that's a big reason average fares have plunged since the 1970s, when adjusted for inflation. The industry takes a much more positive view of deregulation, arguing that competition has brought fares down and given consumers more choice.
"In the late '70s, let's call it what it was — basically rich white people could fly in a plane," Sununu told lawmakers at the hearing last month. "Today, almost any American, through a variety of different ways, can afford to fly from Point A to Point B."
But the industry's critics say fares might be even lower today if airlines were competing directly with each other more often.
"There's not much competition between nonstop routes. You can just look at the data," said Marc Remer, a professor of economics at Swarthmore College. "Essentially, every route's a monopoly or duopoly."
At his previous job, Remer was a research economist in the antitrust division at the Department of Justice, where he analyzed mergers, including airline mergers. Remer says the number of hubs has been shrinking. And airlines are routing more flights than ever through those "fortress hubs," as they're known in the business, where one airline operates more than 70% of flights.
"The hubs have become hubbier, in some sense," Remer said. "It just creates fewer overlap routes between the airlines. And when you have fewer head-to-head overlap routes, you get less competition. And that gives these airlines more market power."
Today, only a few routes at Wichita's Eisenhower National Airport are served by more than one airline. There is not a single nonstop flight to New York or Los Angeles — a far cry from the Wichita airport's heyday in the 1940s, when dozens of planes flew regularly from one coast to the other, according to the Kansas Aviation Museum.
NPR asked Airlines for America to explain why its CEO picked Wichita and Dallas as an example of a success story.
"It was probably not the best choice of examples for routes," John Heimlich, the group's chief economist, said in an interview.
But Heimlich disputes that there's less competition in the airline industry than there used to be.
The largest markets have more competitors per route and more nonstop flights than they did 20 or 30 years ago, Heimlich said. And he argued that megahubs allow airlines to serve a bigger network of destinations than they could otherwise.
"You are never going to have a nonstop flight between Wichita and Tokyo," Heimlich said. "But if you have nonstop flights to Dallas and Denver and Chicago, then guess what? You suddenly have one stop to a lot of places in the world."
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